Next to last Australian school library support service to go

23082013

As of 27 September, Western Australia will lose its last 15 officers who have supported school libraries in that state and around Australia. Formerly Curriculum Materials Information Services (CMIS) and more recently rebadged as E-Schooling – Evaluation and E-Schooling – Cataloguing, staff have been handed their redundancy notices.

No more links to review sources, resource price guides, and guides to selection and managing unique targeted collections. Fiction Focus, Primary Focus, and the CMIS Resource Bank already had met their demise…all helping to resource the curriculum…and the National Curriculum, digital and non-digital.

If you believe in quality school library and learning centres to promote the best for student reading and learning and give teachers the resource support they need on a daily, accessible pre-selected basis, and if you are in WA, ring your local state member now.

Express outrage. Teacher librarians (and especially the many non-professional staff managing libraries in WA) require quality professional support in their efforts to broaden children’s reading experience (raise NAPLAN scores) and support digital teaching and learning and future workplace skills of collaboration and critical thinking.

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May I at this time then take this opportunity to thank the NSW support unit for their very useful site.

In this “e world “of almost information overload may I also quote Waleed Aly ( SMH , pg 23 , August 2013 ) who states what I think is the very obvious so succinctly .. .

“The problem of our age is that we have too much information and nowhere near enough time or wisdom to evaluate it . So we have little choice but to select those things that most arouse our particular obsessions ”

In light of that quote I would like to thank again our NSW support group for providing us with so much including the very useful document accessed through the link below .
It is simple , efficient , effective and user friendly for “team teaching “or is that “CPPT “or is that “collaborative teaching ” ?

Barbara Combes, WASLA President
Secreatary, Literacy and Reading Section, IFLA
I am currently in Singapore at the IFLA 2013 Congress where libraries around the globe, especially school libraries and how they build an informed citizenry, have been a major focus. What a blow to find out that the WA Government has obliterated the final support service for Government schools. The inequality between government and private schools in this state is now complete. WA schools are being squeezed of adequate funding and professional staff on every front.
At IFLA this year all countries around the globe are focusing on literacy and the issues associated with digital resourcing – costs, the selection of quality resources to support the new curriculum and the emerging problem of students having difficulty making meaning from text on screen (digital literacies).
WA it seems, can look forward to more disengaged and disaffected youth, even lower literacy rates and wider gaps between metropolitian and rural and government and private schooling. It is a sad day in the West.

This must be a final blow to the library officers, who appear to be running many libraries in government schools, and who, of necessity, need support to function in a role for which they are probably untrained and unprepared. Library and information services are changing rapidly – just read the ALIA discussion paper, ‘Library and Information Services: The Future of the Profession Themes and Scenarios 2025′ to gain some insight. However it is clear that the Western Australian government does not agree with ALIA and the other school library associations, the experts in the field, that a greater, not smaller, investment in school libraries is needed ‘to ensure that all students are supported to develop document, prose, information and digital literacy skills.’ This is indeed the time to be raising our collective and individual concerns with our local member; the Premier; and the Minister for Education.